Sunday, 27 February 2011

If melanocytes do not produce melanin, it results in albinism, a condition characterised by the absence of colour pigment. Image courtesy of Wikipedia.

Joel Kontinen

If you don’t see evolution anywhere else, try looking at your navel – or perhaps your thumb, arm or knee. When it comes to evolution, it is important to pay attention to skin colour.

Is this supposed to be a joke? No, it’s the latest Darwinian teaching aid. A recent article in Physorg.com claimed that skin colour is a “handy tool for teaching evolution.”

“The mechanism of evolution can be completely understood from skin color”. This is how Nina Jablonski, professor and head of the Department of Anthropology at Penn State University, advised her colleagues to market Darwinian evolution. She was speaking at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science held in Washington last week.

While Darwinists believe that natural selection (in addition to mutations) is the mechanism of evolution, it can only choose from existing genetic material.

Dark skin colour protects people from the sun’s UV radiation, and thus dark-skinned people usually live in the tropics and lighter-skinned ones near the poles.

This has to do with our natural adaptation to our living environment and not at all with evolution. The dispersion of languages at Babel (Genesis 11) explains the phenomenon much better. As the members of the people groups who headed towards the north married within their own group, they began to get light-skinned descendants.

A similar trend was also seen in the people groups who went towards the south. They soon lost the genes that code for dark skin colour.

Even light-skinned people tend to be darker in the summer than in winter. As we spend some time in the sunshine, melanocytes begin to produce melanin that makes our skin darker. All people (except albinos) have this same colour pigment in their skin.

The change is rarely permanent, however. Although descendants of British settlers have lived in Australia for several centuries, they have not become dark skinned under the southern sun.

Using skin colour to market Darwinian evolution is ironic, keeping in mind that in the 1920s at the time of the famous monkey trial at Dayton it was assumed that the white ”race” was superior to all others. In addition, Charles Darwin, for instance, thought that light-skinned people were more evolved than dark-skinned ones.

It is difficult for Darwinian evolution to explain how for instance dark parents could get a completely blond baby.

This is no mystery for the model based on Genesis since all people regardless of their skin colour are related. Most creationists think that Adam and Eve had middle brown skin colour, just like the majority of the world’s population still have.

Saturday, 26 February 2011

Our universe is not the only one in multiverse thinking. Image courtesy of Wikipedia.

Joel Kontinen

John Horgan, who writes a weekly online column for Scientific American magazine, recently read Brian Greene’s new book The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos and was obviously not very pleased with it.

Multiverse is not a new idea. Astronomers have speculated about the existence of other universes for some years and even Scientific American has toyed with the idea.

Recently, Stephen Hawking, for instance, said that he takes the idea of multiple universes seriously.

There is a major problem with this thinking, however. There is not a shred of evidence for the existence of any other universe. As Horgan says:

“These multiverse theories all share the same fundamental defect: They can be neither confirmed nor falsified. Hence, they don't deserve to be called scientific, according to the well-known criterion proposed by the philosopher Karl Popper. Some defenders of multiverses and strings mock skeptics who raise the issue of falsification as ‘Popperazis’—which is cute but not a counterargument. Multiverse theories aren't theories—they're science fictions, theologies, works of the imagination unconstrained by evidence.”

Horgan might have added that when man shuts God outside his thinking, he begins to speculate. At times, this can lead to rather weird ideas.

Source:

Horgan, John. 2011. Is speculation in multiverses as immoral as speculation in subprime mortgages? Scientific American (2 February).

Wednesday, 23 February 2011

A few decades ago, evolutionists assumed that Neanderthals were grunting, stooped ape-like men. However, in recent years their views have begun to change.

A new discovery suggests that Neanderthals admired beauty and probably loved decorating themselves.

Recently, Marco Peresani at the University of Ferrara discovered 660 bird bones among the bones of Neanderthals in northern Italy.

According to New Scientist, “Many of the wing bones were cut and scraped where the flight feathers were once attached, suggesting the feathers had been systematically removed.”

Peresani believes that Neanderthals used the feathers as decorations.

While the discovery does not provide proof that Neanderthals invented the feathered headdress before American Indians did so, together with other recent discoveries it suggests that they were real people just like us, descendants of Adam and Eve.

Source:

Marshall, Michael. 2011. Did Neanderthals use feathers for fashion? New Scientist (21 February).

Monday, 21 February 2011

This is how the universe is assumed to have come into being according to the big bang theory. Image courtesy of Wikipedia.

Joel Kontinen

15 years ago, science writer David Darling, who has a PhD in astronomy, wrote an article that was critical of the big bang. Although he is not a creationist, he was not afraid to tackle scientific orthodoxy.

Darling said that cosmologists do not have a clue as to how everything came into being:

“'In the beginning', they will say, 'there was nothing - no time, space, matter or energy. Then there was a quantum fluctuation from which...' Whoa! Stop right there. You see what I mean?”

”Then they are away and before you know it, they have pulled a hundred billion galaxies out of their quantum hats.”

Darling was surprised that New Scientist published his article, which, he admitted, was controversial.

The origin of the universe can be explained in only two ways. Either God created everything or there are many universes. Other alternatives (such as an eternal universe or an oscillating universe) fail to explain its origin.

The idea of multiple universes or multiverses is pure speculation. There are so many problems in the big bang scenario that in comparison, Genesis 1:1 looks like a much more convincing alternative.

Sunday, 20 February 2011

Researchers have found ”600- million- year” old fossilised seaweed in China. Some of it resembles seaweed that still grows today. The fossils move the appearance of multicellular life 27 million years back in time.

Almost every month researchers find old fossils that have successfully resisted Darwinian evolution for tens or even hundreds of millions of years.

In spite of this, in popular texts evolution is often defined as change.

Saturday, 19 February 2011

In the country ruled by Chairman Mao’s successors, many rural Chinese still lack basic human rights. Image courtesy of Wikipedia.

Joel Kontinen

Although the People’s Republic of China has become an economic superpower, many Chinese still lack the rights stipulated by the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

In 2005 human rights activist Chen Guangcheng, who has been blind from birth, found out that the local authorities had forced 130 000 mothers to undergo abortions or sterilisations in the Linyi area in Shandong.

Having exposed their zeal for the one-child policy, he was imprisoned for four years on trumped-up charges. Chen was released in September 2010, but since then he has been kept in house arrest with round-the-clock surveillance:

While it is important to resist Darwinism, it does not profit us spiritually if we are unable to replace it with enduring truth.

Turkish creationist Mr. Adnan Oktar, who usually uses the pen name Harun Yahya, is known for his websites and countless books in which he has shown that for the most part, extinct animal species look just like modern ones.

He has also shown that Darwinism inspired the totalitarian systems of the 20th century, especially Fascism and Communism.

Yahya, who is a devout Muslim, seems to want others to embrace Islam.

Recently, Harun Yahya commented on Noah’s Ark and the Flood that is also mentioned in the Qur’an. Last year a team from Hong Kong announced they had found the remains of Noah’s Ark on Mt. Ararat.

In contrast to several Christian organisations (for instance AiG, CMI and ICR), he thinks that the discovery is genuine. He says that it is ”the first of the sacred relics to be found in the End Times”.

Although Yahya resists Darwinian evolution, he believes in millions of years of Earth history and thinks that the Flood of Noah’s day was a local deluge.

However, if the Flood had been local, there would have been no need for a huge ark.

The Bible does not know of a local Mesopotamian flood. Genesis describes a destructive global flood that left fossils all over the world. Jesus and the apostle Peter also used the Flood as a warning example in their teaching.

Source:

Noah's Ark discovered on Mount Agri is the first of the sacred relics to be found in the End Times. Harun Yahya.

Thursday, 17 February 2011

At a time when skeptics claimed that no real scientist would doubt Darwinian evolution, Duane Gish, who has a PhD in biochemistry from the University of California, Berkley, rose up to the challenge and showed that it was evolution that was not true.

Together with Dr. Henry Morris, the founder and president of the Institute for Creation Research (ICR), Dr. Gish took part in debates in major US universities. They succeeded so well that evolutionists eventually recommended against debating creationists.

In addition to taking part in 300 debates, Dr. Gish has written 5 books, published 40 papers in scientific journals and written several popular-level articles.

Wednesday, 16 February 2011

Atheists often claim that bad things are a result of religion. However, reality tells a different kind of story.

The genealogy in Genesis four (the line of Cain) differs greatly from that presented in the next chapter, that is, Seth’s genealogy. The former genealogy begins with a murderer (Cain) and ends with a murderer (Lamech). Sin causes misery and destruction, as the apostle Paul said: ”The wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23).

In contrast, the genealogy in Genesis chapter five lists men who prayed to God, prophesised and heard His voice. The line of these patriarchs led to Abraham, Moses and Jesus, who came to take away the curse brought about by human sin.

Source:

Robinson, Robert T. 1986. Literary Functions of the Genealogies of Genesis. The Catholic Biblical Quarterly 48:595-608.

Monday, 14 February 2011

Fossil discoveries have often challenged the belief in millions of years. For instance, soft tissue found in T. rex bone suggests that dinosaurs can hardly be millions of years old. Moreover, soft tissue was also found in an 18-million-year-old salamander fossil.

Researchers have also found DNA in mammoths, further weakening the reliability of dating methods.

The newest challenge comes from arthropods (Arthropoda) that supposedly already lived in the Paleozoic era. According to Physorg, researchers have found remains of “chitin-protein complex - structural materials containing protein and polysaccharide”- in them.

The external skeleton of a crab or crayfish is formed of chitin. For a long time, researchers believed that chitin couldn’t be preserved for tens of millions of years since microorganisms break them apart.

However, George Cody at the Carnegie Institution and colleagues recently found remains of chitin in a scorpion assumed to be 310 million years old and from a scorpion-like arthropod estimated to be 417 million years old.

It is becoming increasingly difficult to believe that the ages assigned to fossils are correct.

Sunday, 13 February 2011

New Scientist suggests that the inhabitants of the Betelgeusian system sent the seeds of life to Earth. Image courtesy of NASA.

Joel Kontinen

In a recent article in New Scientist, Michael Mautner of Virginia Commonwealth University suggests that humans should send bacteria to other galaxies and thus fulfil our reason for living:

“Life is one big family, and the purpose of life is to propagate. If we manage to seed life on a few hundred planets, we can start many chains of evolution. Hopefully some will evolve into intelligent beings."

It seems that New Scientist has begun to subscribe to the view known as panspermia that sees life as coming to Earth from outer space since an editorial in the same issue proposes that our forefathers might have lived in the Betelgeusian system and sent the seeds of life here four billion years ago.

Betelguese is a red giant in the constellation of Orion.

New Scientist advises us to do our duty and send this cosmic chain letter to recipients in other galaxies, hopefully starting a Darwinian process in new worlds.

This raises an interesting question: Has New Scientist decided, to honour Darwin Day (12 February), to admit that life cannot come about spontaneously but needs a birther or at least intelligent genetic information?

After all, we cannot obtain genetic information by magic clothed in a scientific robe. It will only leave the proverbial emperor shivering.

Outer space can be quite cold at times.

Actually, panspermia only removes the solution a few hundreds of light years further into outer space and some billions of years back in time but it fails to address the issue of the origin of the first life.

Source:

Battersby, Stephen. To boldly sow: Seeding the galaxy with Earthly life. New Scientist 2798, 40-43.

A paper recently published in the journal Science on the discovery of the metatarsal bones (the long bones connecting the toes to the rest of the foot) of Australopithecus afarensis has given rise to many kinds of headlines in the popular press. In the wildest scenario, we see a high heeled Lucy walking down a city street without attracting any attention from the other city dwellers.

It is good to remember that researchers have debated Lucy’s bones for over 35 years.

Paleoanthropologists Carol Ward of the University of Missouri and Donald Johanson of the University of Arizona analysed 35 fossils assumed to be A. afarensis specimens that were discovered in the past 15 years in Hadar, Ethiopia. They believe that the fourth metatarsal shows that Lucy was not flat footed but could almost walk like modern humans.

According to Ward, the bone suggests that when its one end touched the ground, the other formed an angle of eight degrees with it, functioning like a shock absorber.

Donald Johanson belonged to the research team that discovered the first A. afarensis remains in 1974 so this might cause him to see Lucy as a very special link leading to modern man.

The history of paleoanthropology knows surprisingly many cases in which the discoverer of a fossil believed that it was the find of the century.

Not all paleoanthropologists share Ward’s optimism. ScienceNOW mentions the dissenting view of Will Harcourt-Smith of the American Museum of Natural History in New York:

“Although he agrees that A. afarensis had some arching, it may have lacked the most important arching on the inside of the foot. Lucy's fingers and toes also were more curved than those of living humans and her shoulder was more apelike—traits useful for tree-climbing.”

According to Harcourt-Smith, Lucy would have been more at home in trees than on the open ground.

Once again, it seems that the headlines do not match reality. We cannot even be sure that the foot bones belong to A. afarensis although they were dated at roughly the same age as the ”original” Lucy found in 1974.

Usually, researchers do not date fossils but they date the ground below or around them, which makes radioactive dating somewhat unreliable.

The assumptions behind the methods also lessen their reliability.

Source:

Gibbons Ann. 2011. Lucy Had a Spring in Her Step. Science NOW (10 February).

Saturday, 12 February 2011

Unbelief is a major element in the worldview of many people. Although news of the dramatic healing of Delia Knox has spread throughout the world, thanks to the Internet, some atheists still deny that a miracle has taken place.

In evangelical circles, Delia Knox was known as a gospel singer who always sang, sitting in her wheelchair. She performed in several countries and co-hosted a weekly television programme.

Atheists and other skeptics have offered a number of explanations for why the miraculous rising from a wheelchair in late August 2010 could not have been genuine –but none of the explanations is convincing.

It is true that some so-called miracles have not stood up to scrutiny. However, the case of Delia Knox is not one of them.

Mrs. Knox was paralysed for over 22 years after an automobile accident. Her church knew it. The neighbours knew it. The local press knew it.

Monday, 7 February 2011

Darwinian explanations are often intriguing. A recent version says that humans have become smarter because evolution has shrunk our brains.

As researchers have measured old skulls, they have noticed that the brains of modern man have shrunk 10 per cent in ”30, 000 years”. According to John Hawks of the University of Michigan, this is “a major downsizing in an evolutionary eye blink.”

For instance, Neanderthals had much larger brains than modern humans.

David Geary, professor of psychology at the University of Missouri, says: ”As complex societies emerged, the brain became smaller because people did not have to be as smart to stay alive".

Although brain size does not directly correlate with intelligence, it is good to remember that not so long ago Darwinians “knew” that bigger brains meant a more evolved human being.

Professor Philip S. Skell, a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, who died last November, criticised Darwinism in a famous article in The Scientist. He for instance said:

”Natural selection makes humans self-centered and aggressive – except when it makes them altruistic and peaceable. Or natural selection produces virile men who eagerly spread their seed – except when it prefers men who are faithful protectors and providers. When an explanation is so supple that it can explain any behavior, it is difficult to test it experimentally, much less use it as a catalyst for scientific discovery.”

In other words, Professor Skell thought that Darwinian explanations were redundant.

Sunday, 6 February 2011

It does not get too cold on these recently discovered exoplanets. Image courtesy of NASA.

Joel Kontinen

"We keep hearing it over and over again: Other planetary systems aren’t like our own," says Debra Fischer, an exoplanet researcher at Yale University. She suggests that the recent discovery of a six-planet system is “just incredible”.

NASA’s Kepler space telescope found a planetary system in the constellation Cygnus approximately 2000 light years from us. Five of the planets orbit their sun closer than Mercury ours and the sixth orbits it at roughly the distance of Venus.

The planets orbiting the star Kepler 11 are all more massive than Earth. Their size varies from that of Earth to Uranus. Three of them are huge gas giants that have atmospheres of hydrogen and helium.

Once again, we find that Earth is a very special planet. This should not come as a surprise since the Bible says that God created the earth to be habitable.

Saturday, 5 February 2011

Recently, the British press reported on an intriguing case. A paralysed American woman leaves her wheelchair and begins to walk in a revival meeting. The comments in Daily Mail suggest that readers were very much interested in what happened. Some thought it was a hoax but others regarded it as a real miracle.

A paralytic cannot just use her willpower to leave her wheelchair and start walking. Something much more is needed.

On Christmas Day 1987 Delia Knox and her sister and brother-in-law and their children were in a bad automobile accident in Toronto, Canada. A drunken driver crashed into their car. The others escaped with slight injuries but Delia Knox was paralysed from the waist down. She had to use a wheelchair for over 22 long years.

Mrs Knox, who is internationally known as a gospel singer, lost all feeling in both legs. After the accident she always sat in a wheelchair when she sang. Church members and neighbours in Alabama knew her as a woman who was bound to a wheelchair.

However, in August 2010 Delia Knox and her husband, bishop Levy Knox, went to a Charismatic revival meeting in Mobile, Alabama, and she was prayed for. As evangelist Nathan Morris from the UK and church members prayed for her, she suddenly felt something in her legs.

Slowly, Mrs Knox rose to her feet, and supported by her husband and some others, began to walk around the floor. Her first steps were wobbly but they were nonetheless steps.

A TV crew was present when she saw her parents after her healing:

Later, Delia Fox returned to the place where she was healed.

In a video recorded in early November she stands for half an hour, recounting how she was healed:

It seems that the healing of Delia Knox was a genuine miracle. Some, who believe that the time of supernatural manifestations is over, have criticised it. Others say that God would have healed her immediately. It is probably good to keep in mind that when Jesus healed a blind man at Bethsaida (Mark 8:22-26), the man first saw men like trees walking and only later saw everything clearly.

Some others have said that the healing is not a work of God. However, we should approach the issue like the Bereans in Acts 17:10-11 and examine whether the healing was biblical. Who received the glory for the healing?

Delia Knox gave all glory to God.

It is understandable that many of us take a critical approach to Charismatic phenomena because much of what happens is not genuine. There was Kenneth Hagin with his "Jesus died spiritually” doctrine, the Copelands and Benny Hinn with their private jets and Todd Bentley of Lakeland notoriety with his bizarre angel manifestations. There have been too many empty promises of healings and much more.

Nathan Morris, the evangelist who prayed for Delia Knox, obviously preaches Jesus Christ as crucified and gives Him all the glory.

As I’ve said before, seeing a fake 10-euro banknote does not mean that there are no genuine ones.

Source:

It's a miracle! After 23 years in a wheelchair, woman walks again and says it is all down to spiritual healing. Mail Online 22 December 2010.

Friday, 4 February 2011

A new pseudoscientific religion explains that all current religions came about when early humans encountered space aliens. Image courtesy of Wikipedia.

Joel Kontinen

“Eve was not a woman but an advanced computer… ‘Eveas Triangulatus’. Of course the ancient writers didn’t understand what a computer was, so the resulting literature derived from that era, are allegorical in nature; however, they do describe an interesting and most important time in our history.”

This is the message of a website called Divine Advanced Human Beings promoting a new yet old doctrine that combines the Bible and pseudoscientific new age beliefs that sound like the teachings of a latter-day Erich von Däniken.

It teaches that all current religions came about when early humans encountered space aliens. They did not understand what they saw so they interpreted them as gods.

Neo- Dänikenism says it knows how everything came into being. However, it cannot explain who made the space aliens. It only moves the explanations further back in time and space.

Who, then, created these space aliens? They cannot have lived from eternity past. Moreover, we don’t even know whether they exist.

In reality, only God could have created all life in the universe. Whereas people are clever at inventing tales, the Bible tells us where we came from, why we are here and where we are going.

Wednesday, 2 February 2011

Textbooks tell us that an asteroid impact killed off the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

However, in recent years the discovery of soft tissue in T. rex and other dinosaur fossils suggests that they cannot be so old.

It is difficult to assume that collagen and blood vessels could be preserved for tens of millions of years.

There are dragon legends all over the world, such as that of St. George and the Dragon. Some descriptions resemble depictions of dinosaurs. In addition, the Book of Job in the Bible tells us about a strange creature known as the Behemoth.

This brief video produced by Answers in Genesis is an intriguing examination of dragon legends: